OMG its the Machinima BLog!

Multiple actors

The valve wiki is a little weird on this, here’s how I create an animation with multiple actors in Garry’s Mod:

Step 1:Load all the models you want, they will show up in tabs on the bottom right of the screen.

Step 2:Create a new choreography, and make all the actors you want, when adding channels, pay attention to the screen, make sure the “add to actor:” has the right actor name!

Step 3:Right click on one of the model tabs and choose: “Associate actor to <modelname>” and in the menu that follows pick the actor you want to associate.

Step 4:Now to get all the actors in the 3D view. Right click on a model tab, and choose “Show <modelname> in 3D view” you have to replace them a little so everyone is nicely visible and not on top of each-other.
You can replace them by holding shift and the left mouse button, right-click and moving your mouse down moves the model backwards.

Step 5:Animate all of them 😉

Step 6:When saving you might get a message that the file is read only, and if you want to make it writable, choose yes.

Step 7:Now to get the animation to gmod: cut the .vcd file out of \steamapps\<username>\half-life 2\hl2\scenesAnd place it in: \steamapps\<username>\garrysmod\garrysmod\scenes

Step 8:Now fire up Garry’s Mod, set up your scene, spawn the actors, look at them and type in the console “ent_setname” followed by the actorname you filled in in faceposer.
Repeat this for all actors.

Step 9:Now to start the whole bunch type “ent_fire <actorname> setexpressionoverride scenes/<yourscene>.vcd”
Don’t do it for all actors, just pick one and the other’s will play their part automatically.
To make them stop animating type in a non existing scenefile in the code above.

Step 10:Win

So that’s how I do it, not sure if there are multiple ways, but this works 😀

Also I’m working on one of the trailers a.t.m. but thanks to a corrupted file I had to start all over again. It took me a few hours but yesterday I got back where I started, and further. 😉